The Astronauts, a new indie dev team with some interesting ideas on gaming, will reveal the game it’s working on in January 2013. The team’s next blog post also promises to be “a very special one” and will be posted in a few days.

Why should you care about The Astronauts? Apart from having a combined 50 years of experience in the industry, the team has some fascinating thoughts on how games can be improved by actually removing gameplay. In a blog post, they write:

“I think than when we’re focused on overcoming a challenge – we try to kill an attacker or win a race – we go into savage beast’s survival mode and shut ourselves down for any “higher class” emotions. Our vision gets extremely narrow, and we’re no longer multi-tasking. Beating the challenge becomes the only thing that matters.”

Hard to argue with. They go on:

“Does it mean that if you want a deeply emotional game, you should drop regular gameplay, with all its core combat loops, gameplay mechanics and other voodoo? Yes.”